


Insecticide

by blissfire



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-04
Updated: 2012-03-04
Packaged: 2017-11-01 03:30:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/351492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blissfire/pseuds/blissfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Viewing the humans as a kind of insect life made many things clearer to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insecticide

Perhaps even more so than Bumblebee, Optimus was acutely aware of human taboos; he had made painstaking study of what was and was not considered appropriate and polite in the society in which they'd found themselves. He'd had to do so in order to best represent his people to the human governments. Fighting against the impressions of Cybertronians made by the Decepticons required tireless effort.

He was thankful for this knowledge after Egypt, when he realized that Megatron was more correct than he knew: the humans were very much like insects.

He thought perhaps that Sam would find his musings humourous, but he was aware that such a comparison would be extremely offensive to their human allies in general. So he kept his peace, though he sometimes looked upon their small friends with a new wonder.

It was the recorded broadcast of the Fallen's worldwide threat that had sparked the notion in his processor. "Citizens of the human hive," he had said. Optimus had found the phrasing odd. An insect hive implied a closed space where all of the individuals in a colony lived on top of one another. Humans had spread out across their planet as far and wide as their biology allowed them.

 _Their planet,_ Galloway had stressed. That was the key, he realized. Having enjoyed the position of the planet's dominant species for as long as their race could remember, human beings didn't feel the need to carve out a place for their home. The entire planet was their home. The humans' hive was the entire Earth.

He was privately somewhat embarrassed that it had taken him over two years to come to this epiphany. He was sure Jazz would have figured it out long ago and laughed at his lack of perception.

Viewing the humans as a kind of insect life made many things clearer to him: the apparent inconsistency of their eager space exploration when coupled with their near-xenophobic fear and anger when space came to them, for one. It wasn't only that the Cybertronians were the first non-human sentient beings they'd encountered. It wasn't only that they were so much larger and more powerful than the humans. It wasn't even solely because they had involved the human race in a deadly war they should have had no part in, had fate been kinder.

Mostly, it was because they had, completely uninvited, invaded their hive. It was their last and only place of safety, their home for generations uncounted, the place their children would raise their children. It sustained them, housed them, protected them, and they spent their whole lives living and working within it. 

They'd honeycombed the surface with the boundaries of nations ruled by their queens and kings, while each caste performed the duties necessary to keep the hive prosperous. And while they fought amongst themselves, when an outside threat appeared, they shone.

Perhaps it was because Cybertron had never had the sheer numbers that Earth could field, but the human methods of waging war felt very different from what Optimus was accustomed to. 

The human soldiers readily accepted that their deaths were not only possible, but almost assured, given what they were fighting. For every Autobot that had fallen on Earth, thousands of humans had perished. And still they came, over and again, and still more yet, replacing those lost.

Like honey bee workers, the humans would often fly into the face of the intruder and give their lives just to deliver one more sting to the enemy threatening their home. And they did it knowing the human who would take their place in the defense of the hive would do the same, on and on until the threat had passed.

They used their technology, fittingly engineered from Megatron himself, to enable a kind of swarm intelligence. One human, frightened and alone and without direction was little threat to a Decepticon. Given a network, the ability to communicate and a common goal, and they could take down a terror such as Devastator.

They were fierce and unrelenting in Earth's defense, not letting their size or power disadvantages dissuade them. And that unity of purpose, that colony-like oneness of mind, even if it took an interstellar war to ignite it, made him confident that humankind would emerge from their cocoon to be a power for good in the wider universe. Optimus would be proud to stand by their side when they assumed that place.

But the one thing that shamed him, something he would not tell even to his own soldiers, was that sometimes, in the heat of battle, he would slip so briefly into thinking of the humans as Megatron did. Certainly, he never hated them as his once-brother did, but sometimes when a helicopter was swatted, burning, out of the sky or when a vehicle he _knew_ was occupied was crushed beneath a careless foot, sometimes... sometimes, it didn't even give him pause. They were so very many, and they lived such short lives and died _so easily_...

But, no. He could not excuse such a betrayal of their allies. It was his own ignoble secret that he would take with him to the Well. And if, after the battle was won and the caskets paraded and the flags folded, he did not feel worthy of attending their services, that too was his own secret to bear. He did not feel that he could honour their sacrifice when at the moment of their deaths he had valued them so much less than he would have one of his own people.

Truly, despite the Fallen's disdain and Megatron's disgust, they themselves were all just as flawed and callous as this young human race, with a history of violence that made the humans' pale in comparison. Perhaps they had just lived so long they'd convinced themselves otherwise. 

The butterfly often forgets it once was a caterpillar, too.

**Author's Note:**

> The forgetful butterfly is from a Swedish proverb.


End file.
